I like bad CVs. It's so much quicker to bin a CV with spelling mistakes in it, than to invite somebody in for a 45 minute interview before you find out that you don't want to hire them.

As someone who had to go job hunting twice in the last few weeks, I can tell you that writing a *good* CV is not something you quickly do in an evening in between playing a computer game and watching a movie.

I spent great amount of time to the layout, typography, spelling, grammar, etc, which is why my CV doesn't suck (IMHO), it will cost you time making the CV, but it will show in the end result and save you time in the long run.
I got invited for an interview by every company I sent my CV to except for one, and that one was a recruiter who offered me a C#/.Net position just after I told him I never did any real Windows development except for some fairly simple Python and C programs ... ... It's not just some CV's that get redirected to /dev/null at first glance, some recruiters deserve the same fate (And, for the record, my CV does have a list of "buzzwords", where neither C# not .NET, not anything remotely similar, are mentioned).

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Why in the name of God do you think I care that you did OS/2 v1.1 in 1989? You may have just finished a PhD in Physics from Cambridge or Stanford, but your astonishing lack of any clue is demonstrated by the fact that more space is given over to the summer job you had in Starbucks than describing why you might actually be of use to the investment banks I recruit for.

I don't quite agree with this one. For example, my CV mentions that I started programming at age 12/13 on the MSX with MSX-BASIC.
Now, this is of course completely deprecated and useless today, in fact, it was completely deprecated and useless when I started with it in ~1997-1998, but I do feel it can add to the "general picture" of an applicant, in this particular example it shows that programming is more than "just a job to pay the bills" ... Things like Daemonforums.org, some personal code projects, and other stuff are mentioned for the same reason.

I should add this is mentioned at the bottom under "Miscellaneous", and it's just a single line with a link, please don't make an entire chapter from it, but it can help, especially if you need to make up for lack in official education and have limited applicable experience (like me). In any case, it was brought up in some way in every interview I had in very positive way. Again, it shows you're more than a 9-5 deskbound slave who's only interested in paying the bills and may also show off some skills.

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Sometimes, just to wind me up, you send me a blue CV. Yes, black text on a blue background.

Because this is what everyone asks? I made mine in HTML/CSS and it looks pixel-perfect ... but only in Opera, not in any other browser. So I send out PDF's. You won't believe how many times I got asked for a Word version, at which point you have to explain you don't have one. It gets even more awkward when people ask you to start Word and paste the text there and you have to explain you don't have Word ... (Also, I spent a lot of time getting the damn thing pixel-perfect, which is impossible in MS Word ... I want to please the recruiter/interviewer, but there are limits ).

I have one addition:
You may want to consider that recruiters know how to use Google, Facebook, Twitter, etc. Chances are your name *will* be searched there. So be conscious about what it will turn up. If you come across like an asshole on Twitter, or constantly call your customers idiots on Facebook, you may want to consider removing this or settings access to private. Of course, not posting this sort of thing in the first place would probably be better

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UNIX was not designed to stop you from doing stupid things, because that would also stop you from doing clever things.

I do the IT for a recruitment group and Word is by FAR our favourite format to get a CV in so we can run it through the CV processing tools we have to automagically populate our database.

Also, we have to reformat the CV's to send to the clients - removing personally identifiable info, so they cannot sidestep us, and therefore our fees. Other formats, but PDF in particular make this a pain to do.

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